With August 11, 1973 marking the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, this course celebrates Hip Hop as a resistance history and culture. We center the origins of Hip Hop in the Brown and Black youth protest cultures of the Bronx, New York. We trace the traditional five pillars of Hip Hop--- rap/emceeing, dance/breakin, (graffiti) graf writing, deejaying, and knowledge--- and add to that: fashion, film, journalism, urban street literature, and scholarship. By looking at these aesthetics and politics historically, we critically examine Black and Brown experiences from the late twentieth century into the twenty-first century in relation to race, neighborhoods, racial capitalism, gender, sexuality, activism, and technology. All along the way, we will curate together a wide genre of Hip Hop performances and build an understanding of Hip Hop Nation Language, Hip Hop Feminisms, Black Language, Hip Hop rhetorics, and sonic rhetorics.
We will treat our class as a kind of maker-space. You will have weekly assignments that ask you to play with music, image, and/or sound rather than just essay-writing (though there will be a little of that too). The point is to experiment, not get it perfect. On most Tuesdays, you will have an assignment (these are called reading responses). These are short assignments that ask you to trace your thinking about something we read, listen to, or watch. Thursdays are designated for panel presentations where you will lead the class. The idea here for doing short, creative tasks is that it will eventually feel more natural and get you out of your head wondering if you are creative enough. You already are!
It is important that you know that this is a rhetoric-writing class. Rhetoric-writing professors often work in English departments but differ from literature faculty in that we delve solely into non-fiction and multimedia works (which is why you won’t be assigned novels in this course—a question that comes up often). Rhetoric-writing professors are also always about the texts we ourselves produce. If students aren’t producing and creating their own original content in creative/ multimedia ways that can leave the confines of the classroom, then it ain’t a real rhetoric-writing class. The works that you create as students are as important as the stuff that you are assigned to read and view. We are not here to just regurgitate, review, and/or summarize the content outlined in a syllabus and lesson plans. We are here to build and create our own world. This is fundamental and is the best part of being in a rhetoric-writing classroom.
We will treat our class as a kind of maker-space. You will have weekly assignments that ask you to play with music, image, and/or sound rather than just essay-writing (though there will be a little of that too). The point is to experiment, not get it perfect. On most Tuesdays, you will have an assignment (these are called reading responses). These are short assignments that ask you to trace your thinking about something we read, listen to, or watch. Thursdays are designated for panel presentations where you will lead the class. The idea here for doing short, creative tasks is that it will eventually feel more natural and get you out of your head wondering if you are creative enough. You already are!
It is important that you know that this is a rhetoric-writing class. Rhetoric-writing professors often work in English departments but differ from literature faculty in that we delve solely into non-fiction and multimedia works (which is why you won’t be assigned novels in this course—a question that comes up often). Rhetoric-writing professors are also always about the texts we ourselves produce. If students aren’t producing and creating their own original content in creative/ multimedia ways that can leave the confines of the classroom, then it ain’t a real rhetoric-writing class. The works that you create as students are as important as the stuff that you are assigned to read and view. We are not here to just regurgitate, review, and/or summarize the content outlined in a syllabus and lesson plans. We are here to build and create our own world. This is fundamental and is the best part of being in a rhetoric-writing classroom.
